No Soup for You!

Obamaville debunks another Obama idea.

By

James Taranto

October 27, 2011

The New York Post has another hilarious dispatch from the People's Republic of Obamaville (or, as it was known before the revolution, Zuccotti Park). It seems "the Occupy Wall Street volunteer kitchen staff launched a 'counter' revolution yesterday--because they're angry about working 18-hour days to provide food for 'professional homeless' people and ex-cons masquerading as protesters."

For three days beginning tomorrow, the cooks will serve only brown rice and other spartan grub instead of the usual menu of organic chicken and vegetables, spaghetti bolognese, and roasted beet and sheep's-milk-cheese salad.

They will also provide directions to local soup kitchens for the vagrants, criminals and other freeloaders who have been descending on Zuccotti Park in increasing numbers every day.

To show they mean business, the kitchen staff refused to serve any food for two hours yesterday in order to meet with organizers to air their grievances, sources said.

It reminds one of Seinfeld's Soup Nazi: "No soup for you!" But it's also reminiscent of President Obama's comments that we noted yesterday: "The one thing that we absolutely know for sure is that if we don't work even harder than we did in 2008, then we're going to have a government that tells the American people, 'you are on your own. If you get sick, you're on your own. If you can't afford college, you're on your own. If you don't like that some corporation is polluting your air or the air that your child breathes, then you're on your own.' That's not the America I believe in. It's not the America you believe in."

ENLARGE

The Soup Nazi
"Seinfeld"

Yet to judge by their actions, the denizens of Obamaville have come to believe in it very quickly. They selfishly feast on spaghetti bolognese and sheep's milk, but when the truly needy show up, the cupboard is bare. "No soup for you! You're on your own, freeloader." Apparently it's the bottom 1% against whom they're waging class war.

Of course we are being half-facetious here. In truth, the Obamavillians are learning why Obama is wrong--why socialism doesn't work. A society that makes a virtue of dependency ultimately encourages freeloading and grifting. The instinct to prevent it is a healthy one. A lot has been written about the similarities and differences between Obamaville and the Tea Party, and here is one: Whereas the latter arose out of the instinct to reward self-reliance and discourage dependency, the former is having it awakened by an encounter with the real world.

Will Obama ever have such an encounter with the real world? Probably not until he's been out of office for at least 10 years. There were no reports that any homeless people or ex-cons showed up asking for dinner at the million-dollar fund-raiser where he made the sanctimonious remarks quoted above. If they had, the Secret Service would have told them they were on their own.

Shrum and Red Bull "The president must be doing something right," Democratic consultant Robert Shrum, whose name rhymes with David Frum, writes in The Week. "He's now getting advice (from all the wrong quarters) that he ought to stop standing up for the people, not the privileged"--or, to put it less awkwardly, that class warfare is a political loser:

First out of the triangulating box was Clinton pollster Mark Penn, who wrote a remarkably data-free piece urging the president to draw back from dividing lines and retreat to formulaic centrism. In effect, Penn recommended a replay of the 1996 Clinton re-election campaign--when, in a pre-Monica time of rising prosperity and job growth, the incumbent still couldn't manage 50 percent of the popular vote, and was left without a serious mandate for his second term. It was this same approach, cautious and at times almost contentless, that doomed Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primaries. Voters were instead drawn to the cause and candidate of change. (She could have been that candidate, but it was too late when she finally embraced the populism Penn had disdained in the early contests.)

One thing you can say about the Mark Penn approach is that it got his man elected. Mr. Clinton ran as a centrist not only in 1996 but in 1992, when he won both the primary and the general election. So the former president's personal record with the approach Shrum scorns is 3-0.

We'll be generous to Shrum and give him Mrs. Clinton in the 2008 nomination contest, since she was generally understood to be more centrist than Obama. But if Obama's general-election was not characterized by "formulaic centrism," it was only because he presented himself as altogether insubstantial. He ran on vague, feel-good promises of "hope and change," not threats of class war (even if the latter were implicit in his policy proposals).

So Democratic centrists are 4-1 in vying for their party's nomination and the presidency. And how has Shrumism panned out? The Washington Post profiled Shrum in 2004, when he was the "closest adviser" to John Kerry, the haughty, French-looking Massachusetts Democrat who by the way served in Vietnam. At the time, the Post put his record at 0-7: He worked for Edmund Muskie and George McGovern in 1972, Ted Kennedy in 1980, Dick Gephardt and Michael Dukakis in 1988, Bob Kerrey in 1992 and Al Gore in 2000.

Kerry made it 0-8, although perhaps we could inflate that to 3-8 if we included candidates who won the Democratic nomination. We're not counting Jimmy Carter, for whom Shrum worked for a few days in 1976 before quitting "with about as much fanfare as an unknown 32-year-old speechwriter can muster":

"Governor Carter," Shrum wrote in a letter of resignation to the future president, "I have decided that in light of my own convictions and in fairness to you, I should leave the campaign without delay." . . . Shrum went on to tell Carter that "I don't believe you stand for anything other than yourself."

We yield to no one in our distaste for Jimmy Carter. But he did win the election.

So here is Shrum, whose record is poor in primaries and a complete failure in general elections, telling Obama--who is unlikely even to face a primary challenge--to run a general election campaign his way. Is the president really foolish enough to listen to Shrum?

Actually, no. Obama is foolish enough to believe this stuff himself.

Victims of Self-Esteem In yesterday's column, we quoted Peggy Noonan's insightful description of President Obama as "a bright, lost older brother." That prompted a reader to remind us of a Noonan classic--a passage from a June 2001 column describing her son's confirmation as a Catholic:

I love some of these children. Some of them have been my son's friends and in my house since preschool--and I want to hug them when I see them. Some are so kindhearted that they bring tears to your eyes. Some of them are deep inside good and mean to do good in the world. A handful of them are brave, too, and have had a lot to put up with in their parents.

But some of them are victims of the self-esteem movement. They have a wholly unearned self-respect. No, an unearned admiration for themselves. And they've been given this high sense of themselves by parents and teachers who didn't and don't have time for them, and who make it up to them by making them conceited. I'm not sure how this will play out as they hit adulthood. What will happen to them when the world stops telling them what they have been told every day for the first quarter century of their lives, which is: You are wonderful.

Maybe it will make for a supergeneration of strong and confident young adults who think outside the box . . . and proceed through their lives with serenity and sureness. Maybe life will hit them upside the head when they're 24 and they get fired from their first job and suddenly they're destabilized by the shock of not being admired. Maybe it will send them reeling.

I always want to tell them: the only kind of self-respect that lasts is the kind you earn by honestly coming through and achieving. That's the only way you'll make a lasting good impression on yourself.

Remind you of anyone? Perhaps the guy we're thinking of will be sent reeling when he's 51.

Lather, Rinse, Repeat Several items that crossed our desk in the past 24 hours remind us of that cliché about the definition of insanity. The first is a piece by Jonathan Chait of New York magazine titled "The Ideological Fantasies of Inequality Deniers." As The American's Jim Pethokoukis notes, this is a familiar rhetorical trope:

Liberals think there are lots of ideas that intelligent Americans just aren't supposed to challenge. If they do, they'll be labeled "deniers," intentionally raising a nasty comparison to Holocaust rejectionists. It's politics at its absolute lowest.

Among the unchallengeable dogmata: the Obama stimulus created millions of jobs, Obamacare will save trillions of dollars, Dodd-Frank prevents future bank bailouts, and policy uncertainty isn't an issue hampering the recovery. And, of course, global warming poses an existential threat to civilization and humanity. Make that an "undeniable" threat.

We don't entirely agree with Pethokoukis; for one thing, politics can get a lot lower. The "denier" trope is most familiar from global warmists, but where has it gotten them? For years now they've been lamenting that they can't seem to win the debate. Maybe it's precisely because they can't resist invoking the specter of the Holocaust, a variant of the argumentum ad Hitlerum that cannot succeed on account of Godwin's Law.

Early in the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama signaled that he was going to break with the Bush administration's Manichean foreign policy. The topic was Iran. He explained repeatedly that the Bush policy of simply pressuring Iran was not working and that he would be willing to talk to the country's leaders to find ways to reduce tensions and dangers. Two years into his presidency, Obama's Iran policy looks a lot like George W. Bush's--with some of the same problems that candidate Obama pointed out two years ago. . . .

Obama should return to his original approach and test the Iranians to see if there is any room for dialogue and agreement.

The reason Obama abandoned that approach was that it failed--and of course it failed. The entire identity of the Iranian regime centers on its hatred for the "great Satan." In the course of making his argument, Zakaria observes: "Within the context of Iranian politics, [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad is the pragmatist." It sounds laughable, but for all we know it's true. And if it is true, it shows why Zakaria's recommendation is so preposterous. For once, at least, Obama knows better.

Maybe for twice. The Puffington Host's Sam Stein reports that "months into the president's run for a second term, mentions of [George W.] Bush have all but disappeared." Say what you will about Obama, there is increasing evidence of his sanity.

Consider Yourself Warned "In June, the editorial department, in cooperation with the newsroom, introduced Sunday Review, an expanded section of editorials, columns and opinion articles, as well as analysis from news reporters. In coming weeks, we will add new online features to our already rich menu of smart, provocative opinion writing."--New York Times website, Oct. 24

Homer Nods The evil alter ego of the antihero in the 1996 film "Primal Fear" was named Roy, not Henry as was stated in an item yesterday (since corrected).

"Black Voters' Support for Obama Is Steady and Strong"--headline, New York Times, Oct. 27

Your Feet's Too Big Over a decade ago, then-First Lady Hillary Clinton bigfooted Rep. Nita Lowey out of a run for the U.S. Senate. Now, New York's Daily News reports, the septuagenarian solon is "squashing" rumors that she's been pushed out of her seat to make room for the secretary of state's daughter:

NY-18 Rep. Nita Lowey's office says it's not true she's leaving the office she won in 1988 to pave the way for a Chelsea Clinton bid for Congress.

A New Rochelle blog, Talk of the Sound, ran a story [yesterday] afternoon which said, in part, that "[Miss] Clinton has been approached by "the right people" in the New York Democratic Party, according to one source in Albany. While no decision has been made, [Miss] Clinton is said to be "actively considering" a Congressional run from New York State in 2012.

UPDATE: "This is 100% false. She is not running for Congress in the 18th District or any other," said Clinton spokesman Matt McKenna.

Isn't this political dynasty business getting ridiculous anyway? At this rate, who'll run for office next, Amy Carter? Patti Davis? George W.--oh wait, never mind.

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit www.djreprints.com.